A Look Into the Past
by Nyiestra
Summary: A series of vignettes reflecting on the lives of the heroes of the Rebel Alliance and the New Republic.
1. Leia

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Star Wars (if only!) and write this story not for profit, but solely for my own amusement.

**Setting:** 25 years after NJO

**A Note: **This is the series I began quite a while ago, titled "The Story They Don't Tell." I renamed it and performed a slight revision of these two and plan to write more. Any suggestions for potential characters will be welcomed, and I have a few in mind right now anyway.

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Leia

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The apartment is finally quiet now. For the last hour or so I've listened to my grandmother crying in the next room. What her tears are for this time, I don't know. But I certainly can't fault her for them, whatever the reason.

Ever since I was a little girl my mother has told my older brother and I stories about the galactic civil war my grandmother helped lead and my grandfather joined – the war that turned my grandparents and their good friends into heroes while taking away any hope they might have had for a normal life. Then there are the other stories, the stories about another war that turned my parents into heroes as well.

So when I hear my grandmother cry, I can't help but wonder what her tears are for this time. Are they for having taken other people's lives when she was younger than my own nineteen years? Perhaps they are for being forced to watch as everyone she knew was killed and her home was blasted out of existence?

Or are they just from the fact that she devoted more than thirty years of her life to fighting for a peace in the galaxy that she never thought she would live to see? Does she cry for all the friends she's lost through those years, all the pain she's witnessed, felt, and inflicted upon others? Are her tears for all the innocents whose lives have been lost during, and because of, her fight for justice and peace? Does she cry so often in private because she's spent so many years putting on a public show of courage and fearlessness?

Then there is my mother. There have been many nights I've seen and heard them together, mother and daughter, talking, laughing and crying over my uncle Anakin who I never had the chance to meet. They've told me through their tears that he died a hero, that he died saving so many others, and I can see how proud they are of him. But I can also see that their pride in his achievements and his sacrifice only serves to increase their pain, as if they can see what a great man he would have been had he lived just a little longer. And now his death is yet another wound left open, one that will probably never be healed.

I try to picture my mother and grandmother as pilots and gunners, wielding lightsabers and blasters, at my age. And I can't. Part of the reason for that, I think, is that I picture them as myself. And I can't picture myself doing those things. I've certainly been trained to use a lightsaber in battle, and I'm a pretty fair shot with a blaster, but I can't imagine having to kill anyone. Maybe that's due to the fact that I haven't grown up in the same galaxy they grew up in. I haven't had to fly a fighter except in practice or use a blaster on anything but targets.

I didn't have to fight an evil Empire, knowing with every step I took that I could be executed for treason. I didn't have to face off against an alien race bent on destroying anything and everything in the galaxy. I haven't had to watch everyone I know leave on dangerous missions that no one has any right to return from. I've never had anyone tell me that my brother or my lover or my best friend or my parents were never coming back to me.

So each time I hear my grandmother cry I try to imagine what her tears are for this time. But there are so many possibilities. There are so many wounds that will never heal, wounds that cause her such immeasurable pain that I cannot begin to fathom its intensity. So I don't think that her tears are for any one thing. I think they're for everything she's seen and done and felt, everything she hopes my brother and I and all of our generation will never be subjected to.


	2. Tycho

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Star Wars (if only!) and write this story not for profit, but solely for my own amusement.

**Setting:** 25 years after NJO

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Tycho

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I remember the first time my father talked with me about his past – about the life he'd had with the Rebel Alliance. Before that, he'd told me some stories, but until then he hadn't really TALKED to me. Some of what he told me I'd hear about over and over again, and, like any child, I never tired of hearing the stories of his adventures. (A good thing, too, when all your parents' friends have the same stories.) Other things, however, he never spoke of again.

I was doing homework for a class on the history of the New Republic, and we were studying the Rebellion at that point. Though I was only ten or eleven at the time, I'd heard enough stories from my parents and their friends to know the names of most of the places that had figured significantly in the Rebellion. In my text, though, I came across the name of an Imperial prison that had never been mentioned in any story. Given the description, I knew I'd have remembered if anyone had ever told me about it. "Dad," I asked. "Where was _Lusankya_?"

He didn't answer me, so I turned to face him and repeat myself, figuring he just hadn't heard me. But when I looked at him I realized that something was very, very wrong. His face was white and he was trembling. I remember thinking that he looked absolutely terrified. I had never ever seen my father afraid of something. Now, years later, I realize that he must have spent a great deal of his life being afraid. But at that point the realization that anything could cause such a reaction in my father frightened me.

We both just sat there for a moment. I wanted to get up and go to him but for some reason I didn't dare move. Finally, though, I got scared enough that I felt I had to do something, and I got up to go get my mother. I thought that maybe she would know what was wrong. But as I walked by, he reached out and grabbed my arm, pulling me into an embrace. He just held me for a moment, and at that point I realized that there had been more to my father's life with the Rebellion than just the exciting stories my parents and their friends told and the glamour that the holovids talked about.

Finally he stood, and led me to the living room, where we sat on the couch, just staring at each other for a few minutes. Then he began to speak, and I hung on every word. I've never listened to anyone so closely in my life.

"_Lusankya _was actually a ship, buried beneath the surface of the planet here on Coruscant. It was a hidden prison run by a woman named Ysanne Isard. Do you know who that is?" I nodded and he went on. "Iceheart – that was what we called her – used the prison to brainwash Rebels that they captured. Then she'd let them go free, and later, when she needed them, she'd turn them into spies and traitors. She could make them do whatever she wanted them to do, and it didn't matter that they'd always been good and loyal." He shuddered slightly.

I huddled closer to him and shivered. "Did you know anyone who got taken to _Lusankya_?" I asked him, my young mind not registering the obvious reason behind his reaction to the name.

He laughed bitterly. "Oh, yes. I knew too many people." His voice fell to a whisper. Then he said the words that finally drove everything home to me. "I was."

I know I just stared at him. I didn't know what to say. Hadn't he just told me that people who went to _Lusankya_ became traitors? Was my father a traitor? I needed to ask, but I couldn't form the words. I was afraid to know the answer.

He looked down at me. "Do your texts say anything about the first real trial they had after the Rebellion won Coruscant?"

I wracked my brain for a minute. "I think so. It was someone accused of treason and murder, right?"

"Yes, it was," he said softly, and I had to strain my ears to hear him. "That was me. They thought that Mr. Horn had died, and because they knew I'd been to Lusankya, and because we didn't really get along too well at first, they thought I killed him." He drew a deep breath. "But mom, and Mr. and Mrs. Antilles, and Mrs. Horn, and the Solos all believed me. They knew I wasn't guilty, and they helped me."

He shook his head, as if trying to clear it of the memories that haunted him. Then, just as suddenly as he'd started to talk about it, he stopped and stood up. "That's what _Lusankya _was," he murmured, and just walked away, leaving me staring after him.

He never spoke about _Lusankya_ again and I never asked, though later I learned a little more about the prison and my father's trial from my teachers and texts, and even some family friends. That was probably one of the shortest – and strangest –conversations I've ever had with my father. But I think I learned more about him then than I have at any other time in my life. I got a lesson that day about just what the Rebellion was really all about; that it wasn't the battles and the ships and the planets, but the people.


End file.
